Interesting Day

[RLOH]

I got out to my latest "honey hole" but arrived with only 45 minutes before the opening time. I did not find any silver or wheat pennies so I left that area. I have hunted this spot hard for many years and a good day is a wheat or two. I was reaching my quitting point with only a couple of 4th of July surface drops in my bag. As always, when I decided to head for my car, I detected my way back. Sometimes I go too fast and hap hazardly when I am in "done for the day" mode. I kept my form and was shortly rewarded with a signal that had numbers from 14 to 36 with a perfect high tone. The depth seemed deep so I dug a plug. 43 War nickel from 8 inches. I decided to grid a 10 x15 foot area around this nickel. A foot away I dug a wheat penny. I ended up with 3 more wheats in this grid before heading off for the car again. Half way there I got the exact same signal as the war nickel and from the a similar depth I dug my second war nickel .

Since all the older coins I found this day were from the 7 to 8 inch depth, I wanted to talk about depth in my area. Many people believe that depth is over rated and in some cases, it is. Over my twenty years of avid detecting, I have found most of my "keeper" coins in the 8 inch deep range. Eight inches is a deep coin for me in my ground. I have had many detectors that just would not produce a good signal on a dime sized coin at my hunting spots. 90% of my silver coins have come from 8 inches plus. Many detectors I have tried will just not work in my spots. I do have bad ground that was judged bad by 3 or 4 bars on the various First Texas detectors I have owned. The absolute best detectors in my spots have been all Fisher CZ's and all Minelab FBS and BBS detectors. It took me thousands of hours and thousands of dollars to come to these conclusions, but it has been FUN.

 

[Happa54]

RLOH, your last couple of posts makes me think about my personal struggles with detecting and digging to deeper than average depths.

It seems you are comfortable locating and digging targets at the depths where I struggle and I can only wish I was as successful as you.

My settings are 16 sens, only neg numbers rejected and conduct cross saved to relic mode.

Although I've gone back and forth between auto & manual sens, 16 works out best for me.

My average dig on targets for coins is approx 6". I hit many targets at the 8" depth but I'm not retrieving enough of them due to my lack of confidence in my detector, my pinpointer or my knowledge & skills with my Safari.

There are many many instances where I get a clean high tone (37-39) and when I dig a deep plug with my Lesche shovel it seems it still isn't deep enough to recover the target.

With my Lesche shovel I can pull out a clean plug and leave a 6" hole, then for an extra couple of inches I'll use my Lesche hand trowel.

My Garrett Carrot pinpointer will sound off indicating there is something there but I tend to give up after digging to the 9" depth.

This happens much too often to the point where if I start digging a deep target and I don'f see it after 8", I simply put the plug back in and walk away searching for something else.

Am I giving up too early and not digging to the depths my Safari is telling me to dig?

I'm seriously tempted to pay someone good money to tutor me on target depth & digging out at the park.

Maybe I should create a new thread on this subject.

Your feedback (or anyone) is appreciated.

 

[Trashfinder]

The safari is the deepest detector I have owned , I gave up at 9 inches and covered a hole up. My brother came over and re-dug the hole and at 10 inches recovered my coin! He was nice and gave it to me. With my etrac,ctx my deep finds are in the 7 to 8 inch range.

 

[Goldstrike]

I got out to my latest "honey hole" but arrived with only 45 minutes before the opening time. I did not find any silver or wheat pennies so I left that area. I have hunted this spot hard for many years and a good day is a wheat or two. I was reaching my quitting point with only a couple of 4th of July surface drops in my bag. As always, when I decided to head for my car, I detected my way back. Sometimes I go too fast and hap hazardly when I am in "done for the day" mode. I kept my form and was shortly rewarded with a signal that had numbers from 14 to 36 with a perfect high tone. The depth seemed deep so I dug a plug. 43 War nickel from 8 inches. I decided to grid a 10 x15 foot area around this nickel. A foot away I dug a wheat penny. I ended up with 3 more wheats in this grid before heading off for the car again. Half way there I got the exact same signal as the war nickel and from the a similar depth I dug my second war nickel .

Since all the older coins I found this day were from the 7 to 8 inch depth, I wanted to talk about depth in my area. Many people believe that depth is over rated and in some cases, it is. Over my twenty years of avid detecting, I have found most of my "keeper" coins in the 8 inch deep range. Eight inches is a deep coin for me in my ground. I have had many detectors that just would not produce a good signal on a dime sized coin at my hunting spots. 90% of my silver coins have come from 8 inches plus. Many detectors I have tried will just not work in my spots. I do have bad ground that was judged bad by 3 or 4 bars on the various First Texas detectors I have owned. The absolute best detectors in my spots have been all Fisher CZ's and all Minelab FBS and BBS detectors. It took me thousands of hours and thousands of dollars to come to these conclusions, but it has been FUN.

Isn't it interesting how we can sometime's find some really great target's when we are 'heading back to our car' or coming away from a park after we have unsuccessfully hunted it to death!! Usually, we are almost dragging that detector in a dejected frame of mind, not wanting to turn the thing off and begrudgingly swinging it in a lazy 2 foot arc!!!!!lol One of the targets I detected while doing just that was the gold ring in my avatar 14.5 grams of 14K gold! I've had similar experiences at the end of a day's detecting and afterwards, we feel like we are walking on air for the rest of the evening!! The depth question is an interesting topic. It seems that the higher the sensitivity, the slower you have to sweep to latch on to those deeper targets that are beyond the reach of the cheaper detectors. One mod; I have adopted which helps me when going deeper and figuring out just where the target is, is taping a paperclip to my pin pointer to increase the sensitivity of the p.p. It really helps to have that when the hole is 8 inches and deeper!